Creating tranquility and peace in your home

Clients often say to me at our first meet­ing: “I’d like to feel safe and have peace at home.” I under­stand, as with all our hec­tic dai­ly lives, we serve oth­ers all day. It is a very impor­tant task for all of us to be able to put the day’s work aside and relax at home. Some clients do not know the impor­tance of design and its effects on our psy­che.

My job is to edu­cate my clients on some of the impor­tant aspects of their home, such as:

respect­ing your own space

under­stand­ing the impor­tance of hav­ing your home reflect your soul

feel­ing safe and con­tent at home

being proud of your space

get­ting rewards from the design of your home.

Once the under­stand­ing of the impor­tance of design is estab­lished, clients and design­er can move on to the “How.” As a design­er, my task is to “feel” what my clients needs are. I use empa­thy and my lis­ten­ing skills to seek out the type of space and style they desire, and need. In most cas­es, I ask a lot of ques­tions, and encour­age my clients to com­mu­ni­cate their thoughts. These ini­tial thoughts do not need to be about the space, they are typ­i­cal­ly very gen­er­al con­ver­sa­tions.

If you’d like to try an exer­cise, you can do the fol­low­ing:

Say out loud, or write down, 3–5 things you like doing the most.

Then say why you like to do those things? What par­tic­u­lar­ly makes you attract­ed to those activ­i­ties? Once you com­plet­ed these activ­i­ties, it is eas­i­er to see a bit of a con­cept behind the design of your home.

I often give my clients home­work, and ask them to bring images of spaces to show me. We have a con­ver­sa­tion about what they like about these images, and why they like those spaces. When I ask ques­tions about mate­ri­als, colours, I often ask spe­cif­ic ques­tions about what tex­tur­al qual­i­ties they like, whether they like warm, or cold feel­ing of tex­tures. The sound qual­i­ties of mate­ri­als are also impor­tant, and we have have to con­sid­er how busy the house­hold is.

It is impor­tant that clients work hard on estab­lish­ing their goals, and take the design work seri­ous­ly. Should you be inter­est­ed in more details, please con­tact me with any design prob­lems.